Advocacy Toolkit

For those who have been touched by childhood cancer and want to tell their story, the Cancer Center at CHOP has put together a Childhood Cancer Advocacy Toolkit. These tools make it simple to tell the world how childhood cancer has changed a child’s life, and communicate the need for pediatric cancer research funding. Your advocacy efforts can help advance treatment options and change the future for the next generation of children diagnosed with cancer.

Update your Facebook cover photo

If you’re running the in the Four Seasons Parkway Run & Walk, benefiting childhood cancer research and survivorship at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, you can help spread the word about this fundraising event by updating your Facebook cover photo using one of the images below.

Download this cover

Download this cover

Download this cover

Tell us how you’re #stillme

Just because you or your child have a cancer diagnosis, it doesn’t mean you’re a totally different person. We’re encouraging childhood cancer patients and their families to share their stories of how they are “still me” despite a cancer diagnosis. Share your story on Facebook, Twitter or anywhere else, and use the tag #stillme.

Contact your members of Congress

Urge your legislator to support enactment of the Food and Drug Administration Safety and Innovation Act (FDA-SIA) which will help incentivize pediatric research, and the Creating Hope Act, which will help efforts to accelerate the availability of new drugs to treat sick children. Act now using this pre-written letter which you can personalize with stories about how you and your family have been affected by cancer.

Send a press release

Step 1: Personalize your press release

Click one of the links below to download one of the two press releases that you’d like to send to local reporters. There is a version for Parkway Run participants and a version about Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.

These Word documents are easy to edit. Just fill in the yellow, highlighted areas with your information so the press release is focused on your Parkway Run team or your childhood cancer story. Once all the yellow has been filled in and the document reads the way you want it to, save the final document to your computer’s desktop.

Step 2: Find a reporter to contact at your local paper or news station

Think about the newspapers and TV stations in your community. Look through the newspaper in print or online to find reporters who write about community events and feature stories about people who live in your town.

Quite often, their email address is at the bottom of their articles, in their biography, or in the website’s Contact Us section. Write down the email address where you want to send your press release.

Step 3: Send your press release

Sending a press release to the local news is easy.

Open a new email and address it to the reporter whose email address you found in Step 2.

In the CC line, add the email address for the Cancer Center’s public relations specialist: salis@email.chop.edu.

In the Subject Line type these words: ”September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.”

Now open the customized document you created in Step 1, select all of the text of the entire press release, copy it, and paste it into the body of your email.

Read through the press release and make sure it’s formatted the way you’d like. You may have to fix some spacing between paragraphs so the document is easy to read.

Press send, and you’re done! Send individual emails to each person you choose to contact. And be sure to check your inbox to look for any responses.